Various types of wooden industrial pallets are known. Many are disclosed in A Handbook of Wooden Pallet Construction and Usage published by The National Wooden Pallet & Container Association. Customarily, industrial pallets comprise a pair, or three or more elongated stringers and a series of deckboards extending in spaced relation crosswise of the stringers.
In the conventional pallet, however, the deckboards are cut to uniform length corresponding to the desired width of the finished pallet. Thus, depending upon the lengths of the boards from which the deckboards are cut, short lengths of boards are left over. Prior to the present invention, these short boards have simply been bundled and sold for firewood or burned by the manufacturer. Needless to say, this is an economically undesirable end use for good quality boards. Thus, a pallet construction which enables the short scrap boards to be used for decking is economically and environmentally desirable.
Several types of patented pallets are known. For instance, U.S. Pat. Nos. 622,666; 2,377,911; and 3,977,333 disclose adjustable pallets which are designed to be expanded or contracted depending upon the desired deck area. U.S. Pat. No. 3,593,407, on the other hand, discloses a pallet having a deckboard cut from plywood in such a manner as to provide a complementary pair of decks without wasting any of the plywood. U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,471,693 and 2,683,010 disclose other types of wooden pallets.